THE IVORY TOWER PROJECT
Ciara Moore | Sound & Film
Site: Hook Head, Wexford, Ireland & Tasman Island, Tasmania, Australia

The Ivory Tower Project is an ongoing multi-media work. It explores signaling systems and failures, sound waves, vibrations, perception, memory, isolation, distortion, truth, fiction, chance and possibility. It is a search for, and a creation of, evidence.

In 1871 a ship carrying a cargo of ivory tusks left San Francisco bound for Liverpool. The ship ran into bad weather and sank off the Irish coast at Hook Head. An article written by a local remembered how, during stormy conditions for years afterwards, elephant tusks were washed up onto the shore. Collected by locals, the elephant tusks were driven between the rocks of stone walls and buildings in the area and used to hang fishing nets. Records state that the cargo was in fact walrus tusks.